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Following the announcement of Apple iPhone 4 at WWDC 2010 yesterday, Apple has quietly released the newest version of Safari web browser – Safari 5 for Windows and Mac, touted to be faster with less clutter and secure extensions.

Safari 5 comes with enhanced feature-set including standards compatibility, speed improvements, a new Apple-vetted extensions system, the ability to switch between Google, Yahoo, and Bing for default search, and a new feature that Apple calls Safari Reader.

5 Things about Safari 5

1. Better Performance – For those who value speed over anything else, Safari 5 comes with Nitro Engine making browser speeds faster than before. It also features DNS pre-fetching which helps in decreasing the page load times of websites.

2. Safari Reader – Safari 5 removes ads and other annoying banners from websites so reading is a smoother experience. When you’re on a webpage reading an article, you click the reader button and the article becomes clutter free.

3. Better HTML5 Support – Safari 5 adds support for HTML5 features including HTML5 Geolocation, HTML5 sectioning elements, HTML5 draggable attribute, HTML5 forms validation, HTML5 Ruby, HTML5 AJAX History, EventSource and WebSocket. Before you get excited, support for all these APIs exist in Firefox and Chrome for quite sometime now and was solely missing in Safari.

4. Secure extensions – My most favorite addition to Safari 5. It will now support secure and signed extensions that run in the browser. The free Safari Developer Program that allows developers to customize and enhance Safari 5 with extensions based on standard web technologies like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. So expect some cool extensions as in Firefox and Chrome on Safari as well very soon.

5. Optional Search Bar – Much like the iOS 4, Safari 5 gives you an option to choose the search bar – Google, Bing or Yahoo

Raju is the founder-editor of Technology Personalized. A proud geek and an Internet freak, who is also a social networking enthusiast. You can follow him on Facebook and on Twitter. Mail Raju PP. Follow rajupp